Category Archives: Editorial

Multi-tasking, Texting, and the Service Economy

We hear all this hype on TV about how the younger generations are now experts at multi-tasking and texting and how video games help our children grow up to be surgeons. But who wants a surgeon who multi-tasks and texts? I mean neither multi-tasking nor texting contribute to a surgeon’s operating-room skills. Both multi-tasking and texting interfere with our ability to concentrate at the task at hand; multi-tasking and texting help us waste our time.

Multi-tasking and texting are products of our service economy; as skills they benefit secretaries, telemarketers, and corporate middle managers. Conversely, specialists (scientists, astronauts, mechanics, doctors, nurses, drivers, engineers, etc.) need to concentrate, not multi-task. Writers need to write, not text. read more

Did Alan Greenspan Cause the Economic Meltdown?

I am good at seeing patterns in life and in data, and I am often good at predicting (although sometimes I do not follow my own good advice), but right now I am unwilling to spend the time necessary to perhaps substantiate the following possibility:

When Alan Greenspan decided to pop the High Tech stock bubble by raising interest rates back in 1999 – 2000 (despite the fact that corporate leaders said he was doing the wrong thing, that he should let the good times continue), he did not take into account unforeseen disasters. Yet unpredicted disaster was on us soon enough, in 2001, when the World Trade Towers fell to dust on 9/11, furthering the decline on Wall Street and in our economy. read more

The Last of Brazil’s Lost Tribe

On the news last night, the reporter called it the lost tribe, but that label seems like propaganda, given that the news report was about how Brazil’s ranchers and farmers had exterminated the tribe over a number of years–obviously the tribe was not lost to these ranchers (or to the Brazilian government, which has been synonymous with unfettered ranching and rainforest destruction for decades now).

I mean the world has been after Brazil to change its ways. The world has been after Brazil for decades. Yet the Brazilian government allowed its ranchers to commit blatant genocide, and neither the United Nations nor any of its members have instituted sanctions against Brazil. I think this state of affairs–a renegade, evil Brazilian government; a United Nations that looks the other way over and over again, even after acknowledging the crime–shows us that our so-called world leaders are a sham. They come from the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel. They are not doing their jobs and are probably too brainwashed and greedy to ever do the right thing. read more

The American Presidency: Selfish Candidates or Candidates for Selfishness?

The headlines today are “Mitt Romney quits after pouring $35 million of his own money into failed campaign.” Of course, we all know that Mitt Romney was running in the Republican primary, the race in which Republican voters choose which Republican leader will run against the Democrats for the U.S. presidency. But I do not hear anyone in the press pointing out that Romney’s $35 million would have been better spent helping the poor right here in the United States.

Romney’s courage (and extra money) would best serve the hopeless (the lost, and especially the lost at sea . . .). read more

War and Immortality

I sent this to CTV News:

Comment re. your 27 April 2007 piece about cancer rates

During the 20th and 21st centuries, we spent a lot of money on war — World Wars I and II, to name just the big ones. If we had spent all that time, energy, money, and life on life-extension, we would have discovered the key to immortality by now.

Maybe someday our enemies will see the light.

World Health and Arrogant Ecologists

We cannot assert that all ecologists and environmentalists are arrogant, but I have encountered quite a few who would have made stronger contributions had they attended compulsory courses in ethics and human kindness. In fact, I believe that many of our professional conservationists have retarded our fight against global warming. If we had replaced them long ago, we would have made more headway in our attempts to introduce preemptive environmental measures.

For example, once when I was discussing the fact that as part of one of my research projects, a rather large group of Seventh Day Adventist fishermen contributed logbooks detailing their catches of salmon, a prominent fisheries ecology professor told me, “Those guys are perverts, the type who climb telephone poles and peep through windows at trailer parks.” read more

Global Warming and Publish or Perish

Yes, I believe that man-made global warming is a fact, but I also know that the discovery of the rise in greenhouse gases was not a major scientific breakthrough, and monitoring the greenhouse effect has not required a vast amount of scientific smarts.

And I wonder, If global warming brings about a major worldwide catastrophe, will that catastrophe prevent an even worse (and so-far unseen) man-made disaster, one that perhaps looms further out in the future. After all, it is science that brings us to these deadly turning points, and our science is the product of human nature. In fact our top scientists and academics arrive at the top though brute ambition, and in the course of their ambition, often abuse their families and students. Their public sense of ethics and honor and moral imperative is not a constant: it is something they often abandon in private, both at home and at school. Ask their sons and ex-wives. Ask the wounded and disabled they all left behind. read more

The rich give us delusions of immortality

The government and the media keep telling us to prolong our lives: quit smoking, exercise, eat right, get a cat and a dog, get married, quit renting, quit driving fast (fly, don’t drive), have two drinks a day, don’t drink, take a multivitamin, don’t take a multivitamin, drink green tea, drink coffee (they say it prevents liver cancer), get a flu shot, walk, run, take a nap, take a bus, work hard, save, save, save, invest, invest, invest, you get what you deserve . . .

One of my doctors said, “It seems they are saying we are supposed to live forever.” read more