Our way of life in America is apparently simple: hardly anything in the public interest gets done unless someone makes money at it.

The verdict about whether our way of life leads to happiness or self-destruction hasn't been written by history yet, but meanwhile there's plenty of misery to go...

The term "gaslighting" derives from an old film called Gaslight, a story of insidious psychological manipulation of a vulnerable woman by her psychopathic husband. The basis of gaslighting is the production of confusion in the victim to the point where the victim is unable to recognize reality, unable to differentiate...

Let's call him Junior. He's ten years old, a bright boy, eyes open on the world, the youngest in a family quartet in one of those clean affluent suburbs outside a large city. Pick your city. Pick your suburb. Pick your family. Four people: Father, Mother, Sister, and Junior.

At...

Apparently as a counterweight to its centrist liberalism, the New York Times keeps a few "house" conservatives writing on its Op-Ed pages. One of these conservatives, David Brooks, occasionally reports on the "human condition" from a conservative viewpoint. In a recent column (July 15, 2008) Mr. Brooks gives us ample...

You can't blame the rightist post-Renaissance political philosophers for their ignorance about politics any more than you can blame the post-Old-Stone-Age Bible writers for their ignorance about biology and life on Earth. Everyone's view of reality is constrained by the knowledge and culture of their time. If you think that...

The American word "baloney" derives from the city of Bologna in Italy, where they call a fine-ground pork sausage "mortadella" -- although in America baloney can also derive from chicken, turkey, or beef.

In English slang, baloney is bunk, bilge, and bosh -- any untruth from an exaggeration to an...

The story of tetra-ethyl lead is a cautionary tale, an example of how allowing the "market" and politics to determine protection standards can bring tragedy to the public.

Leaded gasoline was used in America from the 1920s to the 1980s, and it's still sold overseas by the major oil companies.

The May 27, 2008 editorial column in the New York Times contains a six paragraph ditty entitled, "It's the Genes, Stupid."

Since the New York Times bills itself as the "newspaper of record", you look, you read, your head shakes in disbelief.

According to the editorial, "there is tempting...

Some people, including the New York Times columnist David Brooks, like looking backwards in history with nostalgia and a few sniffles of regret. They go to fine colleges, study history, and imagine they're in love with a perfect time of order and decorum and regularity. (See the Brooks column.)

The supply of garbage about the human brain thrown at the public by the media seems endless. It seems anytime media people need a junk science story that plays into what they think people want to hear they just close their eyes and grab something out of a pickle barrel.

Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that interfere in one way or another with hormones in the body. There's absolutely no question that in low concentrations they can have damaging effects in animals. Since it's not possible to do comparable experiments that test toxins in humans, we're not certain about the...

The cover of the just-out April 21st issue of that sophomoric rag National Review has a close-up photograph of Michelle Obama looking angry -- with the headline: Mrs. Grievance: Michelle Obama and Her Discontent.

The obvious aim of the article is to ridicule Michelle Obama.

Before I go on to...

General Petraeus may be a reliable, educated, and stalwart military officer, but the sense one gets from his robotic circumlocutive responses to questions about his mission is that he must be hiding a great deal from the American people. Since it's the American people who are shedding blood and money...

As the Crazy Ape species, we do an excellent job of exhibiting our craziness. One current mad fandango is the resurgence of the idea of "instincts" as determinants of human behavior.

The notion of inherited behavior is an old theme touted with much hoopla in the early...

During a recent public television appearance, the New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested that given two candidates with equal qualifications, anyone in doubt about who to vote for should vote according to their gut-feeling.

Brooks claims that's democracy at work.

That's a popular idea -- and as...

Most Americans believe intelligence is important, and in particular that it determines what kinds of jobs one can handle. Sweeping the floor of the stock exchange at five o'clock probably
involves less "smarts" than working as a trader on that floor a few hours earlier. This raises a question...

Seventeen years ago, shortly after midnight on February 17, 1991, a 25-year-old white man named Stephen Mobley walked into a Domino's pizza store in Oakwood, Georgia and committed a robbery. The store manager was also a white man, 24-year-old John C. Collins. As Collins knelt on the floor sobbing, Mobley...

So far, the Republican Grand Old Party Iraq War has apparently cost the American people $475 billion -- in addition to 3800 or so dead, maybe 10,000 seriously wounded, many of them with missing limbs or brain injuries.

Bush the Younger originally went to war to topple Saddam Hussein...

An argument can be made that the human attribute that most drives human affairs is awareness of individual mortality, an awareness that pervades all human interactions, strategies, personal choices, all of human history and politics, and all of the arts.

The reality that one's life has a limited, even...

In the 19th century, snake oil was a big seller as a pain- reliever at "medicine" shows throughout rural America. Rattlesnake oil was premium stuff, since presumably you had to catch a rattlesnake in order to get the oil out of it. In fact, most so-called "snake" oils actually came...