Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Bear Stearns, the fifth largest investment bank in the United States, had $17 billion in cash and salable assets on March 11. At the close of trading on Friday, March 14, the eighty-five year-old firm had an exchange-listed market capitalization of just $4 billion. Over the ensuing weekend, one of its competitors, JP […]
Who Loves Ya, Baby?
The true origins of celebrating the notion of romantic love on February 14 are not well documented, though the exchange of elaborate, handmade gifts between paramours was well established by the middle of the eighteenth century in England, and began to really take off in the United States once Esther Howland (herself now considered something […]
Well And Truly F*cked
President George W. Bush came one step closer today to wielding the power to undo nearly 800 years of human progress with the stroke of a pen.
By a vote of 65 - 34 (Maine’s Olympia Snowe could bring herself to neither a yea nor a nay on the matter), the U.S. Senate […]
The Pen And The Sword
Amid rapidly escalating violence between Israel and its tormentors in the Middle East, diminishing traction of the ersatz governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a renewed curiosity toward his behavioral motivations, George W. Bush exercised his constitutional power to veto legislation this week — for the first time in an improbable six-year run as President […]
Blame It On Cain
It’s been a rather impressive millennium on the natural disaster front, wouldn’t you say?
Major earthquakes in Gujarat, India (2001) and Iran (2003) killed over 40,000 people, and in December 2004, the strongest earthquake anywhere in the world in over 40 years, a 9.0 temblor beneath the Indian Ocean, spawned massive tidal waves that devastated coastal […]
Paint By Numbers
There is no getting around the fact that we live in a rich world of complex interactions that often make life and its events seem difficult to understand. This complexity drives whole industries and branches of scientific research, whose existence is predicated on a mission to explain everything from the causes of hypertension […]
The Needle And The Damage Done
How does the man go on?
With every passing day new things go wrong for George W. Bush and his vision for America, yet he and his coterie of sycophants and beneficiaries would have the world believe they have everything under control –that every little thing is just fine and dandy.
Consider the dimensions of his, and […]
California Recall 2003
In a Democracy, the People get the government they deserve.
-Adlai Stevenson
Has it become surreal enough for you, Mr. & Ms. Jones? Clearly, there’s something happening here and you don’t know what it is.
The true interests in play are, as ever, difficult to put […]
Science? What Science?
The Administration of Smoke and Mirrors released this week the newest hit song in its long-running dance of deception, “We Have God On Our Side,” a lullaby produced by the Environmental Protection Agency, with a half share of songwriting credit to the White House Dept. of Information Management.
The sunny, hopeful tune, “Draft Report on the […]